HEATING UP
‘Game of Thrones’: Nikolaj Coster-Waldau on Jon Snow and Daenerys’ Incestuous Romance
‘People are going to love that,’ he says.
HBO
The Mad Queen Cersei may (or may not) have a bun in the oven and her brother-lover Jaime Lannister is over the moon—if the man who plays him is to be believed.
“He’s getting ready. On Sunday afternoons, they have maternity classes,” cracks Game of Thrones star Nikolaj Coster-Waldau. “He wants to be involved! And he’s so desperate that he wants it to be a natural birth—in water. He has this thing with being in a big bathtub, so he’s pushing for that. And Cersei is old-fashioned, so she wants Qyburn around for it. But that freaks him out a little bit.”
Yes, when we last left King’s Landing Cersei (Lena Headey) not only informed Jaime that she’s expecting, but that she plans on no longer keeping their love a secret and declaring him the father. But then, mid-celebratory hug, she whispers into his ear, “Never betray me again.”
It’s a line that Coster-Waldau can’t quite wrap his head around.
“Can you just explain? Because I’ve been asking people about this, and nobody can seem to give me a good answer. Cersei says, ‘Never betray me again.’ How did he betray her? He didn’t know he was meeting Tyrion, so the only betrayal can be if he didn’t kill or capture Tyrion,” he says.
“She’s just crazy! Let’s just face it,” adds a chuckling Coster-Waldau, who credits his and Headey’s contrasting methods for their strong on-screen chemistry.
“We’re very different, the way we work. We love working together. She’s an amazing actor. I try to understand everything before we shoot and she doesn’t want to discuss too much, so we have these different paths and then we meet in the middle,” he says. “We use each other really well.”
In addition to that Cersei line, another thing Coster-Waldau doesn’t get is how audiences gave Jaime and Cersei such a hard time for their incestuous relationship yet are now rooting for Jon Snow and Daenerys Targaryen, who is his aunt, to get it on.
“It’s ironic!” he says. “People are going to love that, though. Everybody wants them to hook up! And they know they’re related! And they’re still going, ‘Come on, do it! We’ll forgive you!’”
He laughs. “Someone came up to me and told me, ‘Well, they’re not as bad as yours!’ and I said, ‘It’s not real, this thing! It’s just a TV show!’”